Yes, in a recent interview with Katie Couric, Governor Palin was unable to name one newspaper or magazine that she reads.

Some take that to mean that she doesn’t read newspapers. Somehow that it is a bad thing. In reality, that just makes Palin in touch with the average American — who also doesn’t read newspapers.

I have news for people — a LOT of people don’t read dead tree publications anymore. Of course, in Couric’s antiquated 1950s world, people can only get news from paper with ink on it and, of course, from the talking pictures (she needs to interview McCain, now that I think about).

I challenge you to name one cool kid who reads a newspaper. Go ahead. I’ll be waiting.

And while I’m at it, who watches network news anymore? Not the cool kids. Even the losers don’t bother watching Couric, either.

If Couric was hip and with it (and if she thought anyone actually watched her show) she would have asked Palin which Web sites and blogs she frequents. If Couric was really cool, she would have asked Palin to name the five biggest tags in her tag cloud of life.

My guess is that “snowmobiling” and “moose hunting” would be pretty high. So would “punching Charlie Gibson in the face.” Extemporaneous speaking and Jeopardy would probably be some of the smaller tags.

I remarked to my girlfriend last night how useless the wire stories about Super Tuesday were each time I saw a new one pop up.

Every time a candidate won a state, a new story was released. Reading over the wire stories made me realize how inadequate the printed word is for election coverage on a day like Super Tuesday.

Why read over a bunch of text that is incapable of conveying the whole picture? Well, I won’t anymore when organizations like CNN, New York Times and others build compelling online features that do the job much better.

The NY Times feature blows my mind with the shear amount of data it has and how beautifully and elegantly it is displayed.

It’s one thing to know what percentage of the vote a candidate gets in each state or how many delegates each candidate gets, but it’s another thing entirely to be able to break the results down by county.

Missouri perfectly illustrates the power of this feature. Hillary Clinton won 119 of 115 counties in Missouri and still lost the state. Barack Obama won the state largely because he won 63 percent of St. Louis County and 55 percent of Jackson County — home to St. Louis and Kansas City, respectively.

I’ve been impressed with CNN’s election coverage for awhile too. It has given me a much better birds-eye view of the election than any written story. And, frankly, why do I need to read a new story every time a candidate wins a state, when I can look at a map showing me exact vote totals and, more importantly, delegate counts.

I also really like how CNN tracks the amount of money each candidate has raised, spent and has on hand. Money is very important to politics, and I’m glad someone is tracking where the money is.

Combine these two features with a political fact-checking site like Politifact and you have the perfect election coverage, which is infinitely better than a newspaper could ever deliver in print.

I love the written word. I’m a writer myself, but some stories are just told better in on other formats. Elections are one of those stories.

The pre-primary polls in New Hampshire predicted a Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton, victory.

They predicted a landslide, a race changing victory. Alas, Clinton won, despite Obama being ahead by double digits in many polls. The polls have been wrong twice now — even exit polls had Obama out front.

The real question is: why do journalists keep trumpeting these obviously flawed polls? If the polls cannot be remotely accurate (and they haven’t been) it’s our duty to not report them. Polls influence elections and democracy.

If these polls aren’t remotely correct, then they are perverting the democratic process. There are many theories as to why the polls were wrong, such as the “Bradley Effect.” The “Bradley Effect” is a theory that says people are more likely to tell a pollster they will vote for a black candidate than they actually would in order to seem more progressive.

Gary Langer goes over the New Hampshire polling mess as well:

There will be a serious, critical look at the final pre-election polls in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire; that is essential. It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong. We need to know why.

But we need to know it through careful, empirically based analysis. There will be a lot of claims about what happened - about respondents who reputedly lied, about alleged difficulties polling in biracial contests. That may be so. It also may be a smokescreen - a convenient foil for pollsters who’d rather fault their respondents than own up to other possibilities - such as their own failings in sampling and likely voter modeling.

I’m not a pollster, and I don’t care why the polls we wrong. I’m a journalist. I just care that the polls were wrong.

Journalists have many ways to cover elections, and polls have always been one part of that coverage. If we cannot trust the veracity of polls then journalists should find something else to cover, like, say the issues. In the meantime, unless pollsters can figure out what is wrong with the polling numbers and how to fix the methodology, journalists should refuse to report on them.

I know this is tough in an era of journalism that is predicated on one thing — making money — but we owe it to our fellow Americans to report only the truth. We owe it to ourselves and our country to report the truth. And baseless polls are anything but the truth.

Otherwise we’re not producing journalism, and we’re not journalists.

P.S. I salute CNN for waiting until after AP and others called the race, because CNN didn’t feel comfortable calling it then. I’d rather them be late, and right, than earlier and wrong. Florida in 2000 anyone?